Secret Societies

Thomas de Quincey

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This essay originally appeared in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 14 (1847): 513-22.
Working under the supervision of Albert Pionke, Associate Professor of
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Notes

1."Chained down their Gods":—Many of
the Greek states, though it has not been sufficiently inquired which
states and in what age, had a notion that in war-time the tutelary deities of the
place, the epichorial gods, were liable to bribery, by secret offers of temples
more splendid, alters better served, &c. from the enemy; so that a standing danger
existed, lest these gods should desert to the hostile camp; and especially,
because, not knowing the rate of the hostile biddings, the indigenous worshippers
had no guide to regulate their own counterbiddings. In this embarrassment, the
prudent course, as most people believed, was to chain the divine idols by the leg,
with golden fetters.

2. "The Farrers."—There is, but by
whom written I really forget, a separate memoir of this family, and published as
a separate volume. In the county histories (such as Chauncy’s, &c.) will
also be found sketches of their history. But the most popular form in which their
memorials have been retraced is a biography of Nicholas Farrer, introduced into one
of the volumes, I cannot say which, of the Ecclesiastical Biography—an
interesting compilation, drawn up by the late Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, a brother
of the great poet.

3. When the murderer is thoroughly diseased by vanity one loses
all confidence in him. Cellini went upon the plan of claiming all eminent murders,
suitable in point of time and place, that nobody else claimed; just as many a short
poem in the Greek Anthologies, marked adespoton (or, without an
owner), was sported by one pretender after another as his own. Even simple
homicides he would not think it below him to challenge as his own. Two princes, at
the very least, a Bourbon and Nassau, he pretended to have shot; it might be so,
but nobody ever came forward to corroborate his statement.

4. This was the earliest attempt at a Polyglot Bible, and had
its name from the town of Complutum, which is, I think, Alcala de
Henarez. The Henarez is a little river. Some readers will thank me for
mentioning that the accent is on the first syllable of Complutum, the u in the
penultimate being short; not Compultum but Complūtum.

5. "Unpleasantries"—this is a new word, launched
a very few years back in some commercial towns. It is generally used—not in
any sense that the reader would collect from its antipole, pleasantry,
but in a sense that he may abstract from the context in the sentence above.

6. It may seems strange to insinuate against the Aglaophamus
any objection, great or small, as regards its crudition—that being
the main organ of its strength. But precisely here lay the power of Lobeck, and
here his weakness; all his strength, and his most obvious defect. Of this he was
sensible himself. At the very period of composing the Aglaophamus, he
found reason to complain that his situation denied him access to great libraries:
and this, perhaps, is felt by the reader most in the part relating to the Eleusinian
mysteries, least in that relating to the Orphic. Previously, however, Lobeck had
used his opportunities well. And the true praise of his reading is, not so much
that it was unusually extensive, as that it was unusually systematic, and
connected itself in all its parts by unity of purpose. At the same time it is
a remark of considerable interest, that the student must not look in Lobeck, for
luminous logic, or for simplicity in arrangement, which are qualifications for
good writing, unknown to the great scholars of modern Germany, to Niebuhr
altogether, and in the next degree unknown to Ottfried Mueller, and to Lobeck.
Their defects in this respect are so flagrant, as to argue some capital vice
in the academic training of Germany. Elsewhere throughout the world no such
monstrous result appears of chaotic arrangement from profound research. As
regards philosophy, and its direct application to the enigmas of these Grecian
mysteries, it is no blame to Lobeck that none must be looked for in him,
unless he had made some pretence to it, which I am not aware that he did. Yet
in one instance he ought to have made such a pretence: mere good sense should
have opened his eyes to one elementary blunder of Warburton’s. I tax W.,
I tax all who have ever countenanced W., I tax all who have ever opposed W.,
I tax Lobeck as bringing up the rear of these opponents, one and all with the
inexcusable blindness of torpor in using their natural eyesight. So much of
philosophy as resides in the mere natural faculty of reflectiveness would have exposed
[pure sloth it was in the exercise of this faculty which concealed] the blunder of W.
in confounding a doctrinal religion [such as Judaism, Christianity,
Islamism] with a Pagan religion, which last has a cultus or ceremonial
worship, but is essentially insusceptible of any dogma or opinion. Paganism had
no creed, no faith, no doctrine, little, or great, shallow, or deep, false or
true. Consequently the doctrine of a future state did not (because it
could not) belong to Paganism. Having no doctrines of any sort,
Grecian idolatry could not have this. All other arguments against W. were
a posteriori from facts and archæology: this was a priori
from the essential principle of an idolatrous religion. All other arguments proved
the Warburtonian crotchet to be a falsehood: this proves it to be an impossibility.
Other arguments contradict it: this leaves it in self-contradiction. And one
thing let me warn the reader to beware of. In the Oriental forms of Paganism,
such as Buddhism, Brahminism, &c., some vestiges of opinion seem at times to
intermingle themselves with the facts of the mythology: all which, however, are
only an after-growth of sectarian feuds, or philosophic dreams, that having
survived opposition, and the memory of their own origin, have finally confounded
themselves with the religion itself as parts in its original texture. But in Greece
there never was any such confusion, even as a natural process of error.
The schools of philosophy, always keeping themselves alive, naturally always
vindicated their own claims against any incipient encroachments of the national
religion.

At a very early age commenced my own interest in the mystery that surrounds
secret societies; the mystery being often double—1. What they do; and 2.
What they do it for. Except as to the premature growth of this interest, there
was nothing surprising in that. For everybody that is by nature meditative must
regard, with a feeling higher than any vulgar curiosity, small fraternities of men forming
themselves as separate and inner vortices within the great vortex of society, communicating
silently in broad daylight by signals not even seen, but if seen, not understood except
among themselves, and connected by the link either of purposes not safe to be avowed, or
by the grander link of awful truths which, merely to shelter themselves from the hostility
of an age unprepared for their reception, must retire, perhaps for generations, behind thick
curtains of secrecy. To be hidden amidst crowds is sublime—to come down hidden
amongst crowds from distant generations, is doubly sublime.

The first incident in my own childish experience that threw my attention upon the
possibility of such dark associations, was the Abbé Baruel’s book, soon
followed by a similar book of Professor Robison’s, in demonstration of a regular
conspiracy throughout Europe for exterminating Christianity. This I did not read, but I
heard it read and frequently discussed. I had already Latin enough to know that
cancer meant a crab, and that the disease so appalling to a child’s
imagination, which in English we call a cancer, as soon as it has passed beyond the state
of an indolent schirrous tumour, drew its name from the horrid claws, or spurs, or roots,
by which it connected itself with distant points, running underground, as it were, baffling
detection, and defying radical extirpation. What I heard read aloud from the Abbé
gave that dreadful cancerous character to the plot against Christianity. This plot, by
the Abbé’s account, stretched its horrid fangs, and threw out its forerunning
feelers and tentacles into many nations, and more than one century. That
perplexed me, though also fascinating me by its grandeur. How men, living in distant
periods and distant places—men that did not know each other, nay often had not even
heard of each other, nor spoke the same languages—could yet be parties to the same
treason against a mighty religion towering to the highest heavens, puzzled my comprehension.
Then, also, when wickedness was so easy, why did they take all this trouble to
be wicked? The how and the why were alike mysterious to me. Yet the
Abbé, everybody said, was a good man; incapable of telling falsehoods, or of
countenancing falsehoods; and, indeed, to say that was superflous as regarded
myself; for every man that wrote a book was in my eyes an essentially good man, being a
revealer of a hidden truth. Things in MS. might be doubtful, but things printed were
unavoidably and profoundly true. So that if I questioned and demurred as hotly as an
infidel would have done, it never was that by the slightest shade I had become tainted
with the infirmity of scepticism. On the contrary, I believed everybody as well as
everything. And, indeed, the very starting-point of my too importunate questions
was exactly that incapacity of scepticism—not any lurking jealousy that even part
might be false, but confidence too absolute that the whole must be true; since the more
undeniably a thing was certain, the more clamorously I called upon people to make it
intelligible. Other people, [513/514] when they could not comprehend a thing, had
often a resource in saying, "But, after all, perhaps it’s a lie." I
had no such resource. A lie was impossible in a man that descended upon earth in that
awful shape of four volumes octavo. Such a great man as that was an oracle for me,
far beyond Dodona or Delphi. The same thing occurs in another form to everybody. Often (you
know)—alas! too often—one’s dear friend talks something, which
one scruples to call "rigmarole," but which, for the life of one (it becomes
necessary to whisper), cannot be comprehended. Well, after puzzling over it for two hours,
you say, "Come, that’s enough; two hours is as much time as I can spare in one
life for one unintelligibility." And then you proceed, in the most tranquil frame of
mind, to take coffee as if nothing had happened. The thing does not haunt your sleep; for you
say, "My dear friend, after all, was perhaps unintentionally talking nonsense."
But how if the thing that puzzles you happens to be a phenomenon in the sky or the
clouds—something said by nature? Nature never talks nonsense. There’s no getting rid
of the thing in that way. You can’t call that "rigamarole." As
to your dear friend, you were sceptical; and the consequence was, that you were able to be
tranquil. There was a valve in reserve, by which your perplexity could escape. But as to
Nature, you have no scepticism at all; you believe in her to a most bigoted extent;
you believe every word she says. And that very belief is the cause that you are disturbed
daily by something which you cannot understand. Being true, the thing ought to be intelligible.
And exactly because it is not—exactly because this horrid unintellibility
is denied the comfort of doubt—therefore it is that you are so unhappy. If you could
once make up your mind to doubt and to think, "Oh, as to Nature, I don’t
believe one word in ten that she says," then and there you would become as tranquil
as when your dearest friend talks nonsense. My purpose, as regarded by Baruel, was not
tentative, as if presumptuously trying whether I should like to swallow a thing, which an
arriére pensée that, if not palatable, I might reject it, but simply
the preparatory process of a boa-constrictor lubricating the substance offered, whatever it
might be, towards its readier deglutition; that result, whether easy or not easy, being one
that followed at any rate.

The person, who chiefly introduced me to Baruel, was a lady, a stern lady, and austere,
not only in her manners, which made most people dislike her, but also in the character
of her understanding and morals—an advantage which made most people afraid of her.
Me, however, she treated with unusual indulgence, chiefly, I believe, because I kept her
intellectuals in a state of exercise, nearly amounting to persecution. She was just five
times my age when our warfare of disputation commenced, I being seven, she thirty-five;
and she was not quite four times my age when our warfare terminated by sudden separation,
I being then ten, and she thirty-eight.—This change, by the way, in the multiple
that expressed here chronological relations to myself, used greatly to puzzle me; because,
as the interval between us had diminished, within the memory of man, so rapidly, that, from
being five times younger, the natural inference seemed to be, that, in a few years, I
should not be younger at all, but might come to be the older of the two; in which case, I
should certainly have "taken my change" out of the airs she continually gave
herself on the score "experience." That decisive word "experience" was,
indeed, always a sure sign to me that I had the better of the argument, and that it had
become necessary, therefore, suddenly to pull me up in the career of victory by a violent
exertion of authority; as a knight of old, at the very moment when he would else have
unhorsed his opponent, was often frozen into unjust inactivity by the king’s
arbitrary signal for parting the tilters. It was, however, only when very hard pressed
that my fair antagonist took this not fair advantage in our daily tournaments.
Generally, and if I showed any moderation in the assault, she was rather pleased with the
sharp rattle of my rolling musketry. Objections she rather liked, and questions, as many as
one pleased upon the pourquoi, if one did not go on to le pourquoi du pourquoi.
That, she said, was carrying things too far: excess in anything she disapproved.
Now, there I differed from her: excess was the thing I doated on. The fun seemed
to me only beginning, when she asserted that it had already "over-stepped the limits
of propriety." Ha! those limits, I thought, were soon reached.

But, however much or often I might vault over the limits of propriety, or might seem to
challenge both her and the Abbé—all this was but anxiety to reconcile
my own secret belief in the Abbé, with the arguments for not believing; it was but
the form assumed by my earnest desire to see how the learned gentlemen could be
right, whom my intense faith certified beyond all doubt to be so, and whom, equally,
my perverse logical recusancy whispered to be continually in the wrong. I wished to see my
own rebellious arguments, which I really sorrowed over and bemoaned, knocked down like
ninepins; shown to be softer than cotton, frailer than glass, and utterly worthless in the
eye of reason. All this, indeed, the stern lady assured me that she had shown over
and over again. Well, it might be so; and to this, at any rate, as a decree of court, I
saw a worldly prudence in submitting. But, probably, I must have looked rather grim, and
have wished devoutly for one fair turn-up, on Salisbury plain, with herself and the Abbé,
in which case my heart told me how earnestly I should pray that they might for ever floor
me, but how melancholy a conviction oppressed my spirits that my destiny was to
floor them. Victorious, I should find my belief and my understanding in painful
schism: beaten and demolished, I should find my whole nature in harmony with itself.

The mysteriousness to me of men becoming partners (and by no means sleeping partners) in [514/515]
a society of which they had never heard; or, again, of one fellow standing at the beginning
of a century, and stretching out his hand as an accomplice towards another fellow standing
at the end of it, without either having known of the other's existence—all that
did but sharpen the interest of wonder that gathered about the general economy of secret
societies. Tertullian's profession of believing things, not in spite of being
impossible, but because they were impossible, is not the extravagance that most
people suppose it. There is a deep truth in it. Many are the things which, in proportion as
they attract the highest modes of belief, discover a tendency to repel belief on
that part of the scale which is governed by the lower understanding. And here, as so often
elsewhere, the axiom, with respect to extremes meeting, manifests its subtle presence. The
highest form of the incredible, is sometimes the initial form of the credible. But the point
on which our irreconcilability was greatest, respected the cui bono of this alleged
conspiracy. What were the conspirators to gain by success? and nobody pretended that they
could gain anything by failure. The lady replied—that, by obliterating the light of
Christianity, they prepared the readiest opening for the unlimited gratification of their
odious appetites and passions. But to this the retort was too obvious to escape anybody, and
for me it threw itself into the form of that pleasant story, reported from the life of
Pyrrhus the Epirot—viz., that one day, upon a friend requesting to know what ulterior
purpose the king might mask under his expedition to Sicily, "why, after that
is finished," replied the king, "I mean to administer a little correction (very
much wanted) to certain parts of Italy, and particularly to that nest of rascals in
Latium." "And then—" said the friend: "and then," said Pyrrhus,
"next we go for Macedon; and, after that job’s jobbed, next, of course, for Greece."
"Which done," said the friend: "which done," interrupted the king,
"as done it shall be, then we’re off to tickle the Egyptians." "Whom
having tickled," pursued the friend, "then we"—"tickle the Persians,"
said the king. "But after that is done," urged the obstinate friend, "whither
next?" "Why, really man, it’s hard to say; you give one no time to breathe;
but we’ll consider the case in Persia, and, until we’ve settled it, we can crown
ourselves with roses, and pass the time pleasantly enough over the best wine found in Ecbatana."
"That’s a very just idea," replied the friend; "but, with submission,
it strikes me that we might do that just now, and, at the beginning of all these
tedious wars, instead of waiting for their end." "Bless me!" said Pyrrhus,
"if ever I thought of that before. Why, man, you’re a conjurer; you’ve
discovered a mine of happiness. So, here boy, bring us roses and plenty of Cretan wine."
Surely, on the same principle, these French Encyclopédistes, and Bavarian Illuminati,
did not need to postpone any jubilees of licentiousness which they promised themselves,
to so very indefinite a period as their ovation over the ruins of Christianity. True, the
impulse of hatred, even though irrational, may be a stronger force for action
than any motive of hatred, however rational, or grounded in self-interest. But the
particular motive relied upon by the stern lady, as the central spring of the anti-Christian
movement, being obviously insufficient for the weight which it had to sustain, naturally
the lady, growing sensible of this herself, became still sterner; very angry with me; and
not quite satisfied, in this instance, with the Abbé. Yet, after all, it was not
any embittered remembrance of our eternal feuds, in dusting the jacket of the Abbé
Baruel, that lost me, ultimately, the favour of this austere lady. All that she
forgave; and especially because she came to think the Abbé as bad as myself, for
leaving such openings to my inroads. It was on a question of politics that our deadliest
difference arose, and that my deadliest sarcasm was launched; not against herself, but
against the opinion and party which she adopted. I was right, as usually I am; but, on this
occasion, must have been, because I stood up (as a patriot, intolerant, to frenzy, of all
insult directed against dear England); and she, though otherwise patriotic enough, in this
instance ranged herself in alliance with a false anti-national sentiment. My sarcasm was not
too strong for the case. But certainly I ought to have thought it too strong for the presence
of a lady; whom, or any of her sex, on a matter of politics in these days, so much am I
changed, I would allow to chace me, like a foot-ball, all round the tropics, rather than
offer the least show of resistance. But my excuse was childhood; and, though it may be true,
as the reader will be sure to remind me, that she was rapidly growing down to my level in that
respect, still she had not quite reached it; so that there was more excuse for me, after all,
than for her. She was no longer five times as old, or even four; but when she would
come down to be two times as old, and one time as old, it was hard to say.

Thus I had good reason for remembering my first introduction to the knowledge of
Secret Societies, since this knowledge introduced me to the more gloomy knowledge of the
strife which gathers in clouds over the fields of human life; and to the knowledge of this
strife in two shapes, one of which none of us fail to learn—the personal strife which
is awakened so eternally by difference of opinion, or difference of interest; the other, which
is felt, perhaps, obscurely by all, but distinctly noticed only by the profoundly reflective, viz.,
the schism—so mysterious to those even who have examined it most—between
the human intellect and many undeniable realities of human experience. As to the first mode of
strife, I could not possibly forget it; for the stern lady died before we had an opportunity to
exchange forgiveness, and that left a sting behind. She, I am sure, was a good
forgiving creature at heart; and, especially, she would have forgiven me, because
it was my place (if one only got one’s right place on earth) to forgive
her. Had she even hauled me out of bed with a tackling of ropes in the dead of
night, for the mere purpose of reconciliation, I should have said—"Why, you see, I [515/516]
can’t forgive you entirely to-night, because I’m angry when people waken me
without notice, but to-morrow morning I certainly will; of, if that won’t do, you shall forgive
me. No great matter which, as the conclusion must be the same in either
case, viz., to kiss and be friends."

But the other strife, which perhaps sounds metaphysical in the reader’s ears, then
first wakened up to my perceptions, and never again went to sleep amongst my perplexities. Oh
Cicero! my poor, thoughtless Cicero! in all your shallow metaphysics not once did you give
utterance to such a bounce as when you asserted, that never yet did human reason say one thing
and Nature say another. On the contrary, every part of Nature—mechanics, dynamics, morals,
metaphysics, and even pure mathematics—are continually giving the lie flatly by their facts
and conclusions to the very necessities and laws of the human understanding. Did the reader ever
study the Antimonies of Kant? If not, he has read nothing. Now, there he
will have the pleasure of seeing a set of quadrilles or reels, in which old Mother Reason amuses
herself by dancing to the right and left two variations of blank contradiction to old Mother
Truth, both variations being irrefragable, each variation contradicting the other, each contradicting
the equatorial reality, and each alike (though past all denial) being a lie. But he need not go to Kant
for this. Let him look as one having eyes for looking, and everywhere the same perplexing
phenomenon occurs. And this first dawned upon myself in the Baruel case. As Nature is to the human
intellect, so was Baruel to mine. We all believe in Nature without limit, yet hardly understand a page
amongst her innumerable pages. I believed in Baruel by necessity, and yet everywhere my
understanding mutinied against his.

But in Baruel I had heard only of Secret Societies that were consciously formed for mischievous
ends; or if not always for a distinct purpose of evil, yet always in a spirit of malignant contradiction
and hatred. Soon I read of other Societies even more secret, that watched over truth
dangerous to publish or even to whisper, like the sleepless dragons that Oriental fable associated
with the subterraneous guardianship of regal treasures. The secrecy, and the reasons for secrecy,
were alike sublime. The very image, unveiling itself by unsteady glimpses, of men linked by
brotherly love and perfect confidence, meeting in secret chambers, at the noontide of night, to shelter,
by muffling, with their own persons interposed, and at their own risk, some solitary lamp of
truth—sheltering it from the carelessness of the world, and its stormy ignorance—this
would soon have blown it out—sheltering it from the hatred of the world, that would soon
have found out its nature, and made war upon its life—that was superhumanly
sublime. The fear of those men was sublime—the courage was sublime—the stealthy
thief like means were sublime—the audacious end, viz., to change the kingdoms of earth,
was sublime. If they acted and moved like cowards, those men were sublime: if they planned
with the audacity of martyrs, those men were sublime—not long, as cowards, not more
as martyrs; for the cowardice that appeared above, and the courage that lurked below, were
parts of the same machinery.

But another feature of sublimity, which it surprises one to see so many coarse minded men
unaware of, lies in the self-perpetuation and phoenix-like defiance to mortality of such Societies.
This feature it is that throws a grandeur even on a humbug, of which there have been many
examples, and two in particular, which I am soon going to memorialise. Often and often have men
of finer minds felt this secret spell of grandeur, and laboured to embody it in external forms. There
was a phoenix-club once in Oxford (up and down Europe there have been several) that by its
constitution grasped not only at the sort of immortality aspired after by Phoenix Insurance offices,
viz., a legal or notional perpetuation, liable merely to no practical interruptions as
regarded paying, and à fortiori as regarded receiving money, but otherwise
fast asleep every night like other dull people—far more faithful, literal, intense, was the
realisation in this case of undying life. Such a condition as a "sede
vacante," which is a condition expressed in the constitutions of all other societies, was
impossible in this, for any office whatever. That great case was realised which has since been
described by Chateaubriand as governing the throne of France and its successions. "His
Majesty is dead!" shouts a voice, and this seems to argue, at least, a moment’s
interregnum: not at all; not a moment’s: the thing is impossible: simultaneous (and not
successive) is the breath that ejaculates "may the King live forever." The
birth and the death, the rising and the setting, synchronise by a metaphysical nicety of neck-and-neck,
inconceivable to the book keepers of earth. These wretched men imagine that the second
rider’s foot cannot possibly be in the stirrup until the first rider’s foot is out.
If the one even occurs in moment M, the other they think must occur in moment N. That
may be as regards stirrups, but not as regards metaphysics. I admit that the guard of a
mail-coach cannot possibly leave the post-office before the coachman, but
upon the whole a little after him. Such base rules, however, find themselves compelled to give way in
presence of great metaphysicians—in whose science, as I stoop to inform book-keepers,
the effect, if anything goes rather a-head of the cause. Now that Oxford club arose on
these sublime principles: no disease like intermitting pulse was known there. No
fire, but Vestal fire, was used for boiling the tea kettle. The rule was—that, if once
entered upon the matricula of this amaranthine club, thence forwards, come from
what zone of the earth you would—come without a minute’s notice—send up
your card—Mr. O. P., from the Anthropophagi—Mr. P. O., from the men whose heads
do grow beneath their shoulders—instantly you were shown in to the sublime presence.
You were not limited to any particular century. Nay, by the rigour of the theory, you had
your own choice of millennium. [516/517] Whatever might be convenient to you, was convenient to the
club. The constitution of the club assumed, that, in every successive generation, as a matter of course,
a President duly elected, (or his authorised delegate) would be found in the chair; scornfully throwing the
onus of proof to the contrary upon the presumptuous reptile that doubted it. Public or
private calamity signified not. The President reverberated himself through a long sinking fund of
Surrogates and Vice-Presidents. There, night and day, summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, sat
the august man, looking as grim as the Princeps Senatûs amongst the Conscript
Fathers of Rome, when the Gauls entered on the errand of cutting their throats. If you
entered this club on the very same errand, the President was backed to a large amount to keep his seat
until his successor had been summoned. Suppose the greatest of revolutions to have passed over the
island during your absence abroad; England, let us say, has even been conquered by a polished race of
Hottentots. Very good: an accomplished Hottentot will then be found seated in the chair; you will be
allowed to kiss Mr. President’s black paw; and will understand that, although farewells
might be common enough, as regarded individual members, yet by the eternal laws of this eternal club,
the word adjournment for the whole concern was a word so treasonable, as not to be
uttered without risk of massacre.

The same principle in man’s nature, the everlasting instinct for glorifying the
everlasting, the impulse for petrifying the fugitive, and arresting the transitory, which
shows itself in ten thousand forms, has also, in this field of secret confederations,
assumed many grander forms. To strive after a conquest over Time the conquerer, is already
great, in whatsoever, direction. But it is still greater when it applies itself to objects
that are per se immortal, and mortal only as respects their alliance with man.
Glorification of heaven—litanies, chaunted day and night by adoring hearts—these
will doubtless ascend for ever from this planet. That result is placed out of hazard, and
needs not the guarantee of princes. Somewhere, from some climate, from some lips, such a
worship will not cease to rise. But, let a man’s local attachments be what they may,
he must sigh to think that no assignable spot of ground on earth, that no nation, that no
family, enjoys any absolute privilege in that respect. No land, whether continent or
island—nor race, whether free men or slaves, can claim any fixed inheritance, or
indefeasible heirlooms of truth. Yet, for that very reason, men of deep piety have but the
more earnestly striven to bind down, and chain their own conceptions of truth within the
models of some unchanging establishments, even as the Greek Pagans of old chained down their
gods1 from deserting them; have striven to train the vagrant water brooks of Wisdom, lest
she might desert the region altogether, into the channels of some local homestead; to
connect, with a fixed succession of descendants, the conservation of religion; to root, as
one would root a forest that is to flourish through ages, a heritage of ancient truth in
the territorial heritage of an ancient household. That sounds to some ears like the policy
that founded monastic institutions. Whether so or not, it is not necessarily Roman Catholic.
The same policy—the same principle—the sighing after peace and the image of
perpetuity—have many times moulded the plans of Protestant families. Such
families, with monastic imaginations linked to Protestant hearts, existed numerously in
England through the reigns of the First James and Charles—families amongst the gentry,
or what on the Continent would be called the lower nobility, that remembered with love the
solemn ritual and services of the Romish Church; but with this love combined the love of
Protestant doctrines. Amongst these families, and distinguished amongst them, was that of
the Farrers.2 The name of their patrimonial estate was Little Gidding, and, I think, in the
county of Hertford. They were, by native turn of mind, and by varied accomplishments, a most
interesting family. In some royal houses of Europe it was once a custom, that every son, if
not every daughter, should learn a trade. This custom subsisted down to the days of the
unhappy Louis XVI., who was a locksmith; and I was once assured by a Frenchman, who knew
him well, not so bad a one, considering (you know) that one cannot be as rough as might
be wished in scolding a locksmith that one is obliged to address as "your majesty."
A majestic locksmith has a sort of right to be a bad one. The Farrers adopted this custom,
and most of them chose the trade of a bookbinder. Why this was a good trade to choose, I
will explain in a brief digression. It is a reason which applies only to three other
trades, viz. to coining, to printing books, and to making gold or silver plate. And the
reason is this—all the four arts stand on an isthmus, connecting them, on one side,
with merely mechanic crafts, on the other side, with the Fine Arts. This was the marking
distinction between the coinages of ancient classical days and our own. Our European and
East Indian coins are the basest of all base products from rude barbaresque handicraft.
They are imagined by the man, some horrid Cyclops, who conceived the great idea of a
horse-shoe, a [517/518] poker, and a tenpenny nail. Now, the ancient coins were modelled by the same
immortal artists that conceived their exquisite gems, the cameos and intaglios,
which you may buy, in Tassie’s Sulphurs, at a few shillings each, of for much less in
the engraved Glyptothecæ. But, as to coining, our dear lady the Queen (God
bless her!) is so avaricious, that she will have it all to herself. She taboos it. She won’t
let you or me into the smallest share of the business; and she lags us if we poach. That
is what I call monopoly. And I do wish her Majesty would be persuaded to read a
ship-load of political economists that I could point out, on the ruinous consequences of
that vice, which, otherwise, it may be feared nobody ever will read. After coining, the
next best trade is Printing. This, also, might approach to a Fine Art. When entering the
twilight of dotage, reader, I mean to have a printing-press in my own study. I shall print
some immaculate editions, as farewell keepsakes, for distribution amongst people that I
love; but rich and rare must be the gems on which I shall condescend to bestow
this manual labour. I mean, also, to print a spelling-book for the reader’s use. As
it seems that he reads, he surely ought to spell. I hope he will not be offended. If he is,
and dreadfully, viewing it as the most awful insult that man could offer to his brother man,
in that case he might bequeath it by will to his possible grandson. Two generations might
wash out the affront. Or if he accepts, and furnishes me with his name, I will also print
on a blank leaf the good old ancestral legend—"A.B., his book, Heaven
grant him grace therein to look," As to Plate-making, it seems to rank with mechanic
baseness; you think not of the sculptor, the chaser, and their exquisite tools, but of
Sheffield, Birmingham, Glasgow, sledge-hammers, and pincers. It seems to require no art.
I think I could make a dessert spoon myself. Yet the openings which it offers are vast,
wherever wealth exists, for the lovelier conceptions of higher art. Benvenuto Cellini—what
an artist was he! There are some few of his most exquisite works in this country,
which may be seen by applying in the right quarters. Judge of him by these, and not by his
autobiography. There he appears as a vain, ostentatious man.3 One would suppose, to hear
him talk, that nobody ever executed a murder but himself. His own are tolerable,
that’s all you can say; but not one of them is first-rate, or to be named on the same
day with the Pope’s attempt at murdering Cellini himself, which must command the
unqualified approbation of the connoisseur. True, the Papal attempt did not succeed, and
most of Cellini’s did. What of that? Who but idiots to judge by the
event? Much, therefore, as I condemn the man’s vanity, and the more so because he
claims some murders that too probably were none of his (not content with
exaggerating his own, he absolutely pirated other men’s murders!) yet, when you turn
from this walk of art, in which he practised only as an amateur, to his
orféverie—then you feel the interval that divides the charlatan
from the man of exquisite genius. As a murderer, he was a poor ceature; as an artist in gold, he
was inimitable. Finally, there remains book-binding, of which also one may affirm,
that, being usually the vilest of handicrafts, it is susceptible of much higher effects in
the enrichments, tooling, architecture, heraldic emblazonries, &c. This art Mr. Farrer
selected for his trade. He had travelled on foot through Spain; and I should think it not
impossible that he had there seen some magnificent specimens of book-binding. For
I was once told, though I have not seen it mentioned in any book, that a century before the
date of Farrer’s travels, Cardinal Ximenes, when printing his great Complutensian
Bible, gave a special encouragement to a new style of binding—fitted for harmonising
with the grandeur of royal furniture, and the carved enrichments of gothic libraries.4 This,
and the other accomplishments which the Farrers had, they had in perfection. But the most
remarkable trait in the family character, was the exaltation of their devotional feelings.
Had it not been for their benignity and humility, they might have been thought gloomy and
ascetic. Something there was, as in thoughtful minds left to a deep rural solitude there
is likely to be, of La Trappism and Madame Guyon Quietism. A nun-like aspiration there was
in the females after purity and oblivion of earth: in Mr. Farrer, the head of the family,
a devotional energy, put forth in continual combat with the earthly energies that tempted
him away to the world, and with all that offered itself under the specious name of public
usefulness. In this combination of qualities arose the plan which the family organised for
a system of perpetual worship. They had a family chapel regularly consecrated, as so many
families of their rank still had in England. They had an organ: they had means of forming
a choir. Gradually, the establishment was mounted: the appointments were completed: the
machinery was got into motion. How far the plan was ever effectually perfected,
would be hard to say. The increasing ferment of the times, until the meeting of the Long
Parliament in Nov. 1640, and in less than two years after that, the opening of the
great civil war must have made it absolutely impossible to adhere systematically to any
scheme of that nature, which required perfect seclusion from worldly cares within the mansion,
and public [518/519] tranquillity outside. Not to mention that the Farrers had an extra source of
molestation at that period, when Puritanism was advancing rapidly to a domineering station
of power, in the public suspicions which unjustly (but not altogether unplausibly) taxed
them with Popish leanings. A hundred years later, Bishop Butler drew upon himself at Durham,
the very same suspicion, and in some degree by the very same act, viz., by an adoption of
some pious symbols, open undeniably to the whole catholic family of Christian Churches,
and yet equivocal in their meaning, because popularly appropriated from old associations
of habit to the use of Popish communities. Abstracting, however, from the violent
disturbances of those stormy times in the way of all religious schemes, we may collect that
the scheme of the Farrers was—that the chapel services should be going on, by means
of successive "reliefs" as in camps, or of "watches" as at sea,
through every hour of the day and the night, from year to year, from childhood to old age.
Come when you might, come in the dawning, come in the twilight, come at noonday, come
through silent roads in the dead of night, always you were to be sure of hearing, through
the woods of Little Gidding, the blair of the organ, or the penitential wail of the
solitary choristers, or the glad triumphant burst of the full choir in jubilation. There
was some affinity in Mr. Farrer’s mind to the Spanish peculiarities, and the Spanish
modes of grandeur; awful prostration, like Pascal’s, before the divine idea; gloom
that sought to strengthen itself by tenfold involution in the night of solitary woods;
exaggerated impressions (if such impressions could be exaggerated) of human
wretchedness, and a brooding sense of some unknown illimitable grandeur—a sense
that could sustain itself at its natural level, only by external contemplation of objects
that had no end.

Mr. Farrer’s plan for realising a vestal fire, or something beyond it, viz., a
secrecy of truth, burning brightly in darkness—and, secondly, a perpetuity
of truth—did not succeed; as many a noble scheme, that men never heard of, has been
swept away in its infancy by the ruins of flood, fire, earthquake, which also are forgotten
not less completely than what they ruined. Thank Heaven for that! If the noble is often
crushed suddenly by the ignoble, one forgetfulness travels after both. The wicked earthquake
is forgotten not less than the glorious temples which it ruined. Yet the Farrer plan has
repeatedly succeeded and prospered through a course of centuries, and for purposes of the
same nature. But the strange thing is (which already I have noticed), that the general
principle of such a plan has succeeded most memorably when applied to purposes of humbug.
The two best-known of all Secret Societies, that ever have been, are the two most
extensive monuments of humbug on the one side and credulity on the other. They divide
themselves between the ancient world and the modern. The great and illustrious humbug of
ancient history was, THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES. The great and illustrious humbug of modern
history, of the history which boasts a present and a future, as well as a past, is FREEMASONRY. Let me take a few liberties with both.

The Eleusinian humbug was for centuries the opprobrium of scholars. Even in contemporary
times it was such. The greatest philosopher, or polyhistor, of Athens, or of Rome,
could no more tell you the secret—the to aporeton (unless he had been initiated,
in which case he durst not tell it)—than I can. In fact, if you come to
that, perhaps I myself can tell it. The ancient philosopher would retort
that we of those days are in the same predicament as to our own humbug—the Freemasons.
No, no, my friend, you’re wrong there. We know all about that humbug, as I
mean to show you. But for what we know of Eleusis and its mummeries, which is quite enough
for all practical purposes, we are indebted to none of you ancients, but entirely to modern
sagacity. Is not that shocking, that a hoax should first be unmasqued when it has
been defunct for 1,500 years? The interest which attaches to the Eleusian shows, is not
properly an interest in them, but an alien interest in accidents indirectly
connected with them. Secret there was virtually none; but a mystery at length begins to
arise—how it was that this distressing secret, viz., of there being no secret at all,
could, through so many generations, pass down in religious conservation of itself from all
profane curiosity of outside barbarians. There was an endless file of heroes, philosophers,
statesmen, all hoaxed, all of course incensed at being hoaxed, and yet not one of them is
known to have blabbed. A great modern poet, musing philosophically on the results amongst
the mob "in Leicester’s busy square," from looking through a showman’s
telescope at the moon, is surprised at the crowd of spectators going off with an air of
disappointment:

"One after one they turn aside; nor have I one espied,
That doth not slackly go away, as if dissatisfied."

Yes, but I can tell him the reason of that. The fact is, a more pitiful sight for
sight-seers, than our own moon, does not exist. The first man that showed me the
moon through a glass of any power, was a distinguished professor of astronomy. I was so
incensed with the hoax (as it seemed) put upon me—such a weak, watery, wicked old
harridian, substituted for the pretty creature I had been used to see—that I marched up
to him with the angry design of demanding my half-crown back again, until a disgusting
remembrance came over me, that, being a learned professor the showman could not possibly
have taken any half-crown, which fact also destroyed all ground of action against him as
obtaining money under false pretences. I contented myself, therefore, with saying, that
until he showed me the man in the moon, with his dog, lanthorn, and bundle of thorns, I
must decline corroborating his fancy of being able to exhibit the real old original moon
and no mistake. Endymion never could have had such a sweetheart as that. Let the
reader take my advice, not to seek familiarity with the moon. Familiarity breeds contempt.
[519/520]

It is certain that, like the travellers through "Leicester’s busy
square," all the visiters of Eleusis must have abominated the hoax put upon them—

________________"nor have I one espied,
That did not slackly walk away, as if dissatisfied."

See now the different luck of hoaxers in this world. Joseph Ady is smoked pretty nearly
by the whole race of man. The Continent is, by this time, wide awake; Belgium has refused
to take in his letters; and the cruel Lord Mayer of London has threatened to indict Joe for
a fraud, value two-pence, by reason of the said Joe having seduced his lordship into opening
an unpaid letter, which was found to contain nothing but an invitation from "yours
respectfully"—not to a dinner party—but to an early remittance of one pound,
for reasons subsequently to be disclosed. I should think, but there’s no knowing, that
there might be a chance still for Joe (whom, really one begins to pity, as a persecuted
man—cruising, like the Flying Dutchman, through seas that have all closed their ports),
in Astrachan, and, perhaps, in Mecca. Some business might be done, for a few years, in
Timbuctoo; and an opening there would undoubtedly be found for a connexion with Abdel-Kader,
if only any opening could be found to Abdel-Kader through the French lines. Now,
on the other hand, the goddess, and her establishment of hoaxers at Eleusis, did a vast
"stroke of business" for more than six centuries, without any "unpleasantries"5
occurring; no cudgels shaken in the streets, little incidents that custom (by making too
familiar,) has made contemptible to the philosophy of Joe; no round robins, signed by the
whole maindeck of the academy or the porch; no praetors or lord mayors threatening actions
repetundarum, and mourning over two-pences that had gone astray. "Misfortune
acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows;" and the common misfortune of having been
hoaxed, lowers the proudest and the humblest into a strange unanimity, for once, of pocketing
there wrongs in silence. Eleusis, with her fine bronzed face, might say proudly and
laughingly—"expose me, indeed!—why, I hoaxed this man’s
great-grandfather, and I trust to hoax his great-grandson; all generations of his house
have been, or shall be hoaxed, and afterwards, grateful to me for not
exposing that fact of the hoax at their private expense."

There is a singularity in this case, of the same kind as that stratagem, (but how prodigiously
exceeded in its scale,) imperfectly executed on the Greek leaders by the Persian Satrap
Tissaphernes, but perfectly, in one or two cases, amongst the savage islands of the South
Seas, upon European crews, when one victim, having first been caught, has been used as the
means of trepanning all his comrades in succession. Each successive novice has been tamed,
by terror, into an instrument for decoying other novices, from A to Z. Next, after this
feature of interest about the Eleusinian Teletai, is another which modern times
have quickened and developed, viz., the gift of enormous nonsense, the inspiration of nonsense,
which the enigma of these mysteries has been the fortunate means of blowing into the brains
of various able men. It requires such men, in fact, to succeed as speculators in nonsense.
None but a man of extraordinary talents can write first-rate nonsense. Perhaps the prince of
all men, ever formed by nature and educations, for writing superior nonsense was Warburton.
The natural vegetation of his intellect tended to that kind of fungus which is called
"crotchet;" so much so, that, if he had a just and powerful thought (as sometimes
he had), or even a wise and beautiful thought, or even a grand one, by the mere perversity
of his tortuous brain, it was soon digested into a crochet. This native tendency of his
was cultured and watered, for years, by his practice as an attorney. Making him a bishop
was, perhaps, a mistake; it certainly stunted the growth of special pleading, perhaps
ruined the science; on the other hand, it saved the twelve judges of that day from being
driven mad, as they would have been by this Hermes Trismegistus, this born Titan, in the
realms of La Chicane. Some fractions of the virus descended through the
Warburtonian commentaries upon Pope, &c., corroding the flesh to the very bones, wherever it
alighted. But the Centaur's shirt of W.’s malignity was destined for the Hebrew
lawgiver, and all that could be made to fall within that field. Did my reader ever read the
"Divine Legation of Moses"? Is he aware of the mighty syllogism, that single block
of granite, such as you can see nowhere but at St. Petersburg, on which that elaborate work
reposes? There is a Welsh bridge, near Llanroost, the birth-place of Inigo Jones, built by
that architect with such exquisite skill, that the people astonished me (but the people
were two milk-maids), by protesting that invariably a little breeze-footed Camilla, of
three years old, in running across, caused the bridge to tremble like a guilty thing. So
admirable was the equilibrium, that an infant’s foot disturbed it. Unhappily, Camilla
had sprained her ancle at that time, so that the experiment could not be tried; and the
bridge, to me, seemed not guilty at all (to judge by its trembling), but as innocent as
Camilla herself. Now, Warburton must have sought to rival the Welsh pontifex in
this particular test of architectural skill; for his syllogism is so divinely poised, that
if you shake this key-stone of his great arch (as you certainly may), then you will become
aware of a vibration—of a nervous tremor—running through the entire dome of his
divine legation; you are absolutely afraid of the dome coming down with yourself in the
centre; just as the Llanroost bridge used to be near going into hysterics when the
light-footed Camilla bounded across it. This syllogism, on account of its connexion with the
Eleusinian hoax, I will rehearse: it is the very perfection of a crotchet. Suppose the
major proposition to be this—That no reli[520/521]gion unless through the advantage
of divine inspiration, could dispense with the doctrine of future rewards and punishments.
Suppose the minor proposition this—That the Mosaic religion did
dispense with that doctrine. Then the conclusion will be—ergo, the Mosaic
religion was divinely inspired. The monstrous tenor of this argument made it necessary to
argue most elaborately that all the false systems of false and cruel religions were
affectionately anxious for maintaining the doctrine of a future state; but 2dly, that only
true faith and the only pure worship were systematically careless of that doctrine. Of course
it became necessary to show, inter alia, that the Grecian States and law-givers
maintained officially, as consecrated parts of the public religion, the doctrine of
immortality as valid for man’s expectations and fears; whilst at Jerusalem, at Hebron,
on Mount Sinai, this doctrine was slighted. Generally speaking, a lie is a hard thing to
establish. The Bishop of Gloucester was forced to tax his resources as an artist, in
building palaces of air, nor less than ever Inigo Jones before him in building Whitehall
or St. Vitus’s bridge at Llanroost. Unless he could prove that Paganism fought hard
for this true doctrine, then by his own argument Paganism would be found true. Just as,
inversely, if he failed to prove that Judaism countenanced the false doctrine, Judaism
would itself be found false. Which ever favoured the false, was true; which ever favoured
the true, was false. There’s a crotchet for you, reader, round and full as any prize
turnip ever yet crowned with laurels by great agricultural Societies! I suspect that in
Homeric language, twice nine of such degenerate men as the reader and myself could not grow
such a crochet as that!

The Bishop had, therefore, to prove—it was an obligation self-created by his own
syllogism—that the Pagan religion of Greece, in some great authorised institution of
the land, taught and insisted on the doctrine of a future state as the basis on which all
legal ethics rested. This great doctrine he had to suspend as a chandelier in his halls of
Pagan mythology. A pretty chandelier for a Christian Bishop to be chaining to the roof and
lightening up for the glory of heathenism! Involuntarily one thinks of Aladdin’s
impious order for a roe’s egg, the egg of the very deity whom the slave of the lamp
served, to hang up in his principal saloon. The Bishop found his chandelier, or fancied he
had found it, in the old lumber garrets of Eleusis. He knew, he could prove, what was taught
in the Eleusinian shows. Was the Bishop ever there? No: but what of that? He could read
through a milestone. And Virgil, in his 6th Ænied, had given the world a poetic
account of the Teletai, which the Bishop kindly translated and expanded into the
truth of absolute prose. The doctrine of immortality, he insisted, was the chief secret
revealed in the mysteries. And thus he proved decisively that, because it taught a capital
truth, Paganism must be a capital falsehood. It is impossible to go within a few pages into
the innumerable details. Sufficient it would be for any casual reader to ask, if this were
the very hinge of all legislative ethics in Greece, how it happened that it was a matter
of pure fancy of accident whether any Greek, or even any Athenian, were initiated or not;
2dly, how the Bishop would escape the following dilemma—if the supposed doctrine
were advanced merely as an opinion, one amongst others, then what authority did it draw
from Eleusis? If, on the other hand, Eleusis pretended to some special argument for
immortality, how came it that many Greek and some Roman philosophers, who had
been introduced at Eleusis, or had even ascended to the highest degree of μυησις, did
not, in discussing this question, refer to that secret proof which, though not privileged
to develop, they might safely have built upon as a postulate amongst initiated brothers?
An opinion ungrounded was entitled to no weight even in the mobs of Eleusis—an
argument upon good grounds must have been often alluded to in philosophic schools. Neither
could a nation of holy cowards, trembling like the bridge at Llanroost, have had it in their
power to intercept the propagation of such a truth. The 47th of Euclid I. might
have been kept a secret by fear of assassination, because no man could communicate
that in a moment of intoxication; if his wife, for instance, should insist on his
betraying the secret of that proposition, he might safely tell her—not a word would
she understand or remember; and the worst result would be, that she would box his ears for
imposing on her. I once heard a poor fellow complain, that, being a Freemason, he had been
led the life of a dog by his wife, as if he were Samson and she were
Dalilah, with the purpose of forcing him to betray the Masonic secret and sign: and these,
he solemnly protested to us all, that he had betrayed most regularly and faithfully
whenever he happened to be drunk. But what did he get for his goodness? All the return he
ever had for the kindness of this invariable treachery was a word, too common, I regret to
say, in female lips, viz. fiddle-de-dee: and he declared, with tears in his eyes,
that peace for him was out of the question, until he could find out some plausible
falsehood that might prove more satisfactory to his wife’s mind than the truth. Now
the Eleusinian secret, if it related to the immortality of the soul, could not have the
protection of obscurity and complex involution. If it had, then it could not have been
intelligible to mobs: if it had not, then it could not have been guarded against
the fervor of confidential conversation. A very subtle argument could not have been
communicated to the multitudes that visited the shows—a very popular argument would
have passed a man’s lips, in the ardour of argument, before he would himself be aware of it.

But all this is superfluous. Let the reader study the short essay of Lobeck on this
subject, forming one section in three of his Aglaophamus, and he will treat, with
derision, all the irrelevant skirmishing, and the vast roars of artillery pointed at shadows,
which amuse the learned, but disgust the philosophic in the "Divine Legation."
Much remains to be done that Lobeck’s rustic seclusion [521/522] denied him the opportunities
for doing;6 much that can be done effectually only in great
libraries, But I return to my assertion, that the most memorable of all Secret
Societies was the meanest. That the Society which made more people hold their tongues than
ever the Inquisition did, or the mediæval Vehm-gericht, was a hoax; nay, except
Freemasonry, the hoax of hoaxes.